D&D Beholder Collector’s Set

I had planned on using a beholder in one of my D&D 3.5e games and I didn’t have a beholder miniature.

It was an impulse buy. The hobby store where I found it was going out of business. Otherwise I would have passed it over.

The miniatures themselves are painted okay–a little better than the standard fare one sees with prepainted D&D miniatures. My favorite is the Frost Beholder (the white one), followed by the standard Beholder. The others, the Ghost Beholder and the Eye of Shadow, just rely on their near-translucent plastic to look neat.

The storage box itself is nice, though it’s already seeing signs of decay even though it’s been primarily sitting on my shelf since I bought it. The back label is starting to peel and the plastic cover over the miniatures has scratch marks were the plastic rubs on the inside of the box (not shown because the marks would have clouded the figures in the picture above).

Each figure also comes with stat cards for D&D 4e. (I’ve never used these).

My biggest beef, perhaps, is that the eyes on the eye stalks look cheesy–Red dots in the middle of a white spot? Really? Come’on. Where’s the pupils?

I’ve used the standard Beholder figure just once and it was in that D&D 3.5e game. The player-characters spotted a Beholder skulked about in ruined town at some distance.

And I said, “And it looks like THIS!” Then I put the miniature on the table.

They all ran away. And one player complained about Beholders being too unbalanced and floating TPK machines.

In any case…

Get this if: You really like Beholders. You want to complete you D&D Miniature collection. You can get it for cheap.

Don’t Get this if: You never use Beholders in your game. You don’t like the paint jobs. You can’t get it for cheap.